Demographic dynamics and the production of space in the (re)dimensioned frontier of Mato Grosso's Agribusiness

Abstract

In the last decades, the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso has been occupying a prominent place on the national economic scene due to the expansion of corporate farming also known as agribusiness, which  impacts on the process of urbanization of its territory, both through the rising of urban centers and through the new demographic and economic dynamics that take place in it. This process began in the 1970s through the effective incorporation of Mato Grosso’s territory into the webs of globalized capitalism, through the expansion of its agricultural frontier. This movement has been (re)produced in the 21st century towards the biome called Cerrado, which is the “Brazilian savannah”, with the expansion of a modernized and highly capitalized agricultural production, aimed at meeting the logic of a globalized market. In this space, the growth of the number of cities is a part of the political strategy of “occupying void spaces” of the territory, which, until then, had not been inserted in the productive forces. In this new spatiality, the agricultural frontier emerges with its territories determined by power relations, in which the strategic dimension of the urban space constitutes the way to meet the productive rationality of the countryside. This paper aims to reflect on the relevance of demographic dynamics in the formation and occupation of “empty spaces” in the state of Mato Grosso and how this event contributes to the process of urbanization in/of the territory.